A Robot's Story
by lucaura678
Summary: A lone robot wakes up in the middle of an unknown cave, with no memory of when, or how, he got there, or much of anything really. The path of recollection is a dangerous one, however, and this robot will be pushed to his very limits to make it out alive. (A Cave Story narrative.)


All he knew was pain. For what seemed like an eternity, his body screamed in pain. He made no sound, despite his mouth being wide open, like a silent scream. After ten seconds that seemed to stretch on forever, he could make out the sounds of his companion fighting. He could tell that their opponent was speaking, but he couldn't make out a single word she was saying. Until...

"You two are quite tenacious, I'll give you that. But you couldn't change anything, in the end. Farewell!"

MEMORY READ ERROR! UNIT SRB-001"QUOTE" HAS EXPERIENCED EXCESSIVE MEMORY DEGRADATION. FULL SYSTEMS CHECK INITIATED. CHECKING... LOSS OF WEAPON SYSTEMS DETECTED! WEAPON SYSTEMS GIVEN PRIORITY TWO. WEAPON SYSTEMS CHECK INITIATED. CHECKING... DONE

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OFFENSIVE CAPACITY IS MINIMAL! ACQUISITION OF NEW ARMAMENTS RECOMMENDED TO BE HIGHEST PRIORITY! CONTINUING SYSTEMS CHECK. CHECKING... MOVEMENT SYSTEMS FUNCTIONAL. HIGHER THOUGHT PROCESSES FULLY FUNCTIONAL. ALL VITAL SYSTEMS FUNCTIONAL. RADAR NONFUNCTIONAL. DEACTIVATING. SYSTEMS CHECK COMPLETE. ACTIVATING HIGHER THOUGHT PROCESSES.

He woke up with a pounding headache. Where was he? Even more so, what was his name? As his body started to fully wake up, he had already come across a problem when trying to answer the latter. The file storing his name was completely corrupt. Far more pressing was the humidity in the air. As he appeared to be in an enclosed space, and the humidity had to have come from somewhere...

The robot bolted upright, looking around in a panic.

 _Where's the water?!_

When he had ascertained that no, he wasn't in danger of taking an unwilling dip, he set his entire processing power to recovering his name. He would rather not only use "he", "him", and "his" to refer to himself. A few minutes later, he had restored enough for him to guess that his name was Quote, based on the fact that his serial number was SRB-001"Quote". "Quote" entered this as his new name. As far as he was concerned, worst comes to worst, he can just change it at a later date.

Quote stood up and decided to try and find a way out. The space he was in was rather large, the ceiling being far out of reach, even if he jumped. Not that he'd want to anyway, as the ceiling was covered in slimy looking stalactites. Quote was having none of that. After a single look around he saw a ramp off to his left, past some holes in the floor. As he approached, he decided to look into the holes.

And nearly had a panic attack.

 _Ack! Water!_

Needless to say, Quote gave the holes a wide berth. When he went up the ramp, however, he saw a dead end, and began to turn around to think of a way to escape his watery prison. As he turned, he saw a ledge a above him, and more importantly, an open door. When Quote exited the part over the cave he was in, he saw that the cave split in two directions.

 _Great, now which way do I go?_ Then he felt a breeze coming from the left and went to investigate.

A short while after Quote started following the breeze, he came upon a sandy cave in. It looked rather brittle, as though it had been there for awhile and had calcified. As he was though, Quote simply wasn't strong enough to break through.

Seeing no way through the calcified wall, Quote decided to go down the other available path. After he passed the door he entered from, he saw some obviously dangerous spikes.

 _They even have blood splattered on them! Even more so, how did ANYONE hit these?! They're out of the way, next to the walls! You'd have to run into them on purpose!_

While Quote was having his internal rant, something nearby saw him, and decided that he looked like a good snack, not realizing that Quote was robotic. Said creature carefully detached itself from the stalactites above, and slowly flew towards it's prey. Eventually Quote heard a flapping sound, and turned towards it. His reaction was to be expected.

 _Awww! What a cute bat._

Expected from him that is. Quote walked up to the bat, intending to give it a hug. The bat had a very different perception of the action. To it, it looked like Quote was approaching for an attack, and responded in kind. Fangs flashed forward and, surprisingly, sank into the metal of Quote's shoulder. Quote jumped from the sudden attack, and started flailing about in an attempt to shake off the bat. On one particularly sharp turn to the right, the bat was flung into a wall, and it began fluttering around in a daze. Quote, clearly not wanting anything to do with something that could bite through metal, quickly high tailed it down the passage. In his haste, however, he startled pretty much every other bat in the cave. As they all converged on his position, he only had one thought.

 _This is gonna suck, isn't it?_

It was at this point in time that his tactical systems came up with a report

OPPONENTS APPEAR TO TRACK PREY BY SOUND AND SCENT, RATHER THAN BY SIGHT. SUGGESTED COURSE OF ACTION: MOVE INTO WATER AND CEASE MOVEMENT.

 _Well, the Tactical has spoken, even though_ **stopping** _in_ **water** _is a terrible idea! I don't want to drown!_

Putting his fear of water aside for the time being, Quote found a pool of water that reached up to his neck, and dropped in. While the inevitable splash alerted the bats to his presence there, the water wiped off any scents that they may have been using to track him. After that it was just a matter of hiding under an over hang and stopping to lose the bat swarm. Once the swarm was sufficiently far away enough, Quote got out from under the ledge that he was hiding under, and promptly lamented the fact that he just _went into a pool of water that was up to his_ _ **neck, what in the WORLD was he THINKING?!**_

As Quote began to get over his internal crisis, a little blob with eyes and two small antenna hopped over to where he was standing, despite the lack of any kind limb or muscles, and started to eye him curiously. When it took another tentative hop closer, Quote noticed it. After the experience with the bat, one would expect for him to attack the new creature. Except said new creature was adorable.

The creature, which his systems designated as a Critter(Quote didn't know how his systems came to that designation, but he wasn't going to question it at the moment, because cute.), startled by the "sqeee"ing sound that Quote was making, quickly hopped away.

After a couple more moments, Quote realized that the Critter was no longer around.

 _Awww, where did it go? Why are all of the cute things running away from me?_

Quote promptly decided to dedicate one of his four parallel processors to developing possible reasons as to why this may be. A few seconds later he got an alert in the lower left corner of his field of view.

 _That was quick. I wonder what it came up with-OH COME ON!_

THE ONLY POSSIBLE REASON IS THAT YOU ARE SCARY, YOU CREEP.

He promptly set that processor to have diagnostics run on it, as he was **not** okay with his systems having a sense of humor. That usually meant that a program was buggy, and needed to be fixed.

With that out of the way, Quote took a quick look at his surroundings. He was near a large door way that was carved into the shape of a roaring lion.

 _Well, this is a surprise. There's actually someone living here?_

There was a simple door, just a sliding sheet of metal, covering the entrance. Quote pulled it aside, and took a peek inside. It was a fairly humble abode, not very spacious, but definitely enough for the one elderly inhabitant. At the other end of the room sat a chest that looked like someone had put a lot of effort into maintaining it. The old individual seemed to be sleeping, although heat scans showed an amount of heat that just wasn't natural in an old body like that. His systems, on the other hand, took note of the multiple tools hanging from chains on the ceiling. Or rather, the fact that some of those tools were gun making tools. Needless to say, Quote's systems were very adamant in getting him to look around for the potential gun. When he failed to find one in any of the carved cupboards, Quote was forced to look in the chest.

 _I shouldn't look in there! That chest is obviously important to that persons, so-nononoNO,WAIT!_

The lid lifted upward.

Inside was a navy blue pistol with a strange, dot and line marking. It looked painfully familiar to Quote, although he couldn't remember why. Tactical, on the other hand, came up with something:

MATCH FOUND FOR SYMBOL IN SECONDARY NAVIGATIONAL DATABASE.

 _Oh? And what has Tactical found?_

PATTERN ON GUN STRONGLY RESEMBLES THE PART OF THE CONSTELLATION "URSA MINOR" THAT CAN BE VIEWED BY THE NAKED $#/&% EYE.

 _What's an " Ursa Minor"? Oh well, at the very least, having this gun will get Tactical to stop taking control. And I can always come back here, right?_

Quote shivered.

 _Why do I get a terrible foreboding about this? It's probably nothing to worry about._

With gun in hand, Quote continued back outside, only for something terrible to happen.


End file.
